Mary Wollaston Part 32

It occurred to her to suggest that they go back, but she dismissed the impulse with no more than a glancing thought. It was his burden, not hers, that remained to be shouldered at the cottage and it might be left to him to choose his own time for taking it up. Paula seldom came down much before noon anyhow.

As for John Wollaston, he was very tired. Paula's volcanic moments always exhausted him. He never could derationalize his emotions, cut himself free; and while he felt just as intensely as she did, he had to carry the whole superstructure of himself along on those tempestuous voyages. In the mood Paula had left him in this morning, there was nothing in the world that could have satisfied and restored him as did his daughter's companions.h.i.+p. The peace of this wordless prolongation of their talk together was something he lacked, for a long while, the will to break.

It was not far short of noon when they came back into the veranda together. He had walked the last hundred yards, after a look at his watch, pretty fast and after a glance into both the down-stairs rooms, he called up-stairs to his wife in a voice that had an edge of sudden anxiety in it. Then getting no response, he went up, two at a time.

Mary dropped down, limp with a sudden premonition, upon the gloucester swing in the veranda. The maid of all work, who had heard his call, came from the kitchen just as he was returning down the stairs. Mrs. Wollaston had gone away, she said. Pete had reported with the big car at eleven o'clock and Paula, who apparently had been waiting for him, had driven off at once having left word that she would not be back for lunch.

"All right," John said curtly. "You may go."

He was so white when he rejoined Mary in the veranda that she sprang up with an involuntary cry and would have had him lie down, where she had been sitting. But the fine steely ring in his voice stopped her short.

"Have you any idea," he asked, "where she has gone or what she has gone to do? She came down," he went on without waiting for her answer,--"and looked for me. Waited for me. And thanks to that--walk we took, I wasn't here. Well, can you guess what she's done?"

"It's only a guess," Mary said, "but she may have gone to see Martin Whitney."

"Martin Whitney?" he echoed blankly. "What for? What does she want of him?"

"She spoke of him," Mary said, "in connection with the money, the twenty thousand dollars..."

He broke in upon her again with a mere blank frantic echo of her words and once more Mary steadied herself to explain.

"Her agreement with Mr. Ware required her to put up twenty thousand dollars in some banker's hands as a guarantee that she would not break the contract. She mentioned Martin Whitney as the natural person to hold it. So I guessed that she might have gone to consult him about it;--or even to ask him to lend it to her. As she said, it wouldn't have to be spent."

"That's the essence of the contract then. It's nothing without that.

Until she gets the money and puts it up. Yet you told me nothing of it until this moment. If you had done so--instead of inviting me to go for a walk--and giving her a chance to get away..."

He couldn't be allowed to go on. "Do you mean that you think I did that--for the purpose?" she asked steadily.

He flushed and turned away. "No, of course I don't. I'm half mad over this."

He walked abruptly into the house and a moment later she heard him at the telephone. She stayed where she was, unable to think; stunned rather than hurt over the way he had sprung upon her.

He seemed a little quieter when he came out a few minutes later.

"Whitney left half an hour ago for Lake Geneva," he said. "So she's missed him if that's where she went. There's nothing to do but wait."

He was very nervous however. Whenever the telephone rang, as it did of course pretty often, he answered it himself, and each time his disappointment that it was not Paula asking for him, broke down more or less the calm he tried to impose upon himself. He essayed what amends good manners enabled him to make to Mary for his outrageous attack upon her. It went no deeper than that. The discovery that Paula was gone and simultaneously that he need not have lost her obliterated--or rather reversed--the morning's mood completely.

It was after lunch that he said, dryly, "I upset your life for you, half a dozen years ago. Unfairly. Inexcusably. I've always been ashamed of it.

But it lends a sort of poetic justice to this."

She made no immediate reply, but not long afterward she asked if she might not go away without waiting for Paula's return. "It would be too difficult, don't you think?--for the three of us, in a small house like this."

He agreed with manifest relief. He asked if it was not too late to drive that afternoon to Hickory Hill, but she said she'd prefer to go by train anyhow. That was possible she thought.

He did not ask, in so many words, if this was where she meant to go.

There was no other place for her that he could think of.

CHAPTER XXI

THE SUBSt.i.tUTE

It was a good guess of Mary's that Paula had gone to borrow the twenty thousand dollars but it was to Wallace Hood, not to Martin Whitney, that she went for it; and thereby ill.u.s.trated once more how much more effective instinct is than intelligence.

Martin, rich and generous as he was, originator as he was of the edict that Paula must go to work, would never have been stampeded as Wallace was in a talk that lasted less than half an hour, into producing securities to the amount that Paula needed and offering them up in escrow for the life of Maxfield Ware's contract.

Wallace was only moderately well off and he was by nature, cautious. His investments were always of the most conservative sort. This from habit as well as nature because his job--the only one he had ever had--was that of estate agent. But Paula's instinct told her that he wouldn't find it possible to refuse. I think it told her too, though this was a voice that did not make itself fairly heard to her conscious ear, that he would be made very fluttered and unhappy by it whether he granted her request or not.

What he would hate, she perceived, was the suddenness of the demand and the irrevocable committal to those five years; the blow it was to those domesticities and proprieties he loved so much. The fact that he would be made sponsor for those unchartered excursions to Mexico, to South America, and so on, under the direction of a libidinous looking cosmopolite like Maxfield Ware.

Why she wanted to put Wallace into the flutters she couldn't have told.

She was, as I say, not quite aware that she did. But he had been running up a score in very minute items that was all of five years old. The fact that all these items went by the name of services, helpful little acts of kindness, made the irritation they caused her all the more acute.

I don't agree with Lucile Wollaston's diagnosis, that Paula could not abide Wallace merely because he refused to lose his head over her, but there was a grain of truth in it. What she unconsciously resented was the fundamental unreality of his att.i.tude to her. Actually, he did not like her, but the relation he had selected as appropriate to the first Mrs.

Wollaston's successor was one of innocent devotion and he stuck, indefatigably, to the pose. So the chance to put his serviceability to the proof in consternating circ.u.mstances like these, afforded her a subtle satisfaction. He'd brought it upon himself, hadn't he? At least it was he and no other who had put Mary up to the part she had played.

None of this, of course, came to the surface at all in the scene between them. She was gentler than was her wont with him, very appealing, subdued nearer to his own scale of manners than he had ever seen her before. But she did not, for a fact, allow him much time to think.

He asked her, with a touch of embarra.s.sment, whether John was fully in her confidence concerning this startling project, and if she had won his a.s.sent to it.

"He knows all about it," she said--and with no consciousness of a _suppressio veri_ here. "We hardly talked of anything else all last night. I didn't get to sleep till four. He doesn't like it, but then you couldn't expect he would. For that matter neither do I. Oh, you don't know how I hate it! But I think he sees it has to be. Anyhow, he didn't try very hard to keep me from going on with it--And Mary, of course, is perfectly satisfied."

Even his not very alert ear caught something equivocal in those last sentences, and he looked at her sharply.

"Oh, I'm worn to ribbons over it!" she exclaimed, and this touch of apology served for the tearing edge there had been in her voice. "I couldn't let him see how I feel about it. It would be a sort of relief to have it settled. That's why I came straight to you to-day."

He tried, but rather feebly, to temporize. We mustn't let haste drive us farther than we really wanted to go. The matter of drawing the formal contract, for instance, must be attended with all possible legal safe-guards, especially when we were dealing with a person whose honor was perhaps dubitable.

"I thought we might go round to see Rodney Aldrich about it, now," she said. "He's about the best there is in that line, isn't he? Why don't you telephone to his office and find out if he's there."

This seemed as good a straw as any to clutch at. The chance of catching as busy a man as Aldrich with a leisure half hour was very slim. The recording angel who guarded his wicket gate would probably give them an appointment for some day next week, and this would leave time for a confirmatory talk with John. But, unluckily, Rodney was there and would be glad to see Mrs. Wollaston as soon as she could be brought round.

"Then, that's all right," Paula said with a sigh of relief. "So if you really believe I'll keep my word and don't mind putting up the money for me, it's as good as settled."

There was one more question on his tongue. "Does John know that you have come to me for it?" But this, somehow, he could not force himself to ask.

Implicitly she had already answered it--hadn't she?

"Of course I believe, in you, in everything, my dear Paula. And I'm very much--touched, that you should have come to me. And my only hope is that it may turn out to have been altogether for the best."

And there was that.

It was not until late that night that his misgivings as to the part Mary might have played in this drama really awoke, but when they did he marveled that they had not occurred to him earlier. He recalled that Mary had prophesied during their talk at the Saddle and Cycle that Paula would attribute to her the suggestion--whoever might make it--that an operatic career for John's wife was desirable and necessary for financial reasons.

She had said too, in that serious measured way of hers, "If Paula ever saw me coming between her and father, whether it was my doing or not, she would hate me with her whole heart."

Had that prediction been justified? There were half a dozen phrases that Paula had allowed herself to use this afternoon, which added up to a reasonable certainty that it was altogether justified. It was not easy for him to admit to himself that he didn't like Paula; that he knew her and had long known her for a person incapable of following any lead save that of her own primitive straightforward desires.